Innovation Insights is a monthly series on Research World looking at all thing’s technological innovation. The series is based on several recent surveys with Arm (semi-conductor company valued at £23.4 billion) and will cover topics such as:
- Security – will security concerns stifle technological and product innovation or simply lead to more secure products?
- Insight driven innovation – what processes can be used to turn insight into innovation and how can insights into the way youths interact with technology be used to prototype software that assists and empowers them to tackle cyberbullying?
Last time, we explored how ‘Jobs to Be Done’ provides the insight needed for successful innovation. This time, we discuss Design Thinking.
Unlike Jobs to Be Done, Design Thinking is an end-to-end innovation framework that goes past exploratory research and delivers real product prototypes.
But, just like Jobs to Be Done, Design Thinking is insight-led. This makes it relevant for us all.
So, what is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking explains the design process from start to finish. It’s been used since 1950 and companies like Nike and Google, use it for developing products
Design Thinking is partly successful because of its simplicity. It involves four stages:
- Discover problems and opportunities in your innovation area via primary and secondary research
- Define the innovation challenge you’ll solve and frame how you’ll solve it
- Develop as many ideas as you can to solve your innovation challenge
- Deliver the best idea back to your business
What role does insight play in Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is an insight-led process. Like all good leaders, insight’s role is pivotal at the start, middle and end.
The start: insight discovers innovation opportunities and defines the innovation challenge
The most important part of any innovation is the start. A small misdirection at this stage can derail the chances of any innovation succeeding. And it’s almost impossible to rectify any problems later on.
Recognising this, Design Thinking starts with robust research. The Discover stage can include a mix of primary and secondary, qualitative or quantitative research. Often a hybrid approach leads to the best results.
While there’s no methodological rules, insights from this research focus on current user problems and opportunities, centred around the chosen innovation area.
The most critical part comes next: consolidating, prioritising and reframing insights. This allows you to Define the innovation challenge. The innovation challenge is a “problem statement” that outlines the problem you’re trying to solve.
Insight entirely dictates the problem statement. And every subsequent Design Thinking stage builds from this point. So, ensuring insights at the start are robust, unbiased and actionable is critical.
The middle: insight develops and selects innovation ideas
The middle part of Design Thinking Develops many different product ideas to answer the problem statement. Once again, insight’s role is central to this process.
Insights from the initial research will inform a set of criteria, guidelines and thresholds which all product ideas must meet. These typically reflect where the biggest innovation opportunities lie. But they’re also informed by commercial realities e.g., what factories can build, or what brands can credibly deliver.
Many of Design Thinking’s creative idea generation techniques deliver lots of ideas quickly. Resultantly, there’s often a need to select the best idea to take forward to the end. This can be done with simple polling, concept testing or even prediction markets.
The end: insight used to deliver the best idea back to the business
At this stage of Design Thinking, your innovation should be in a good place, steered from the start by insights.
And, as you’ve probably guessed, insight plays an important role in Delivering your chosen product idea back to the business as a prototype or proof of concept.
Prototypes are made using a process of testing and iterating. And the testing part always involves some form of research and insight.
This could be as simple as getting feedback on an early-stage prototype from a handful of friends or colleagues. Or as sophisticated as testing the commercial viability of your prototype via a conjoint with a large sample.
Insight allows the prototype to iteratively evolve. This ensures it stays on track to deliver maximum commercial benefit to your organisation.
What role should we, as insight professionals, play in Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a framework for designers. But it relies so strongly on research and insight that it’s also a framework for us.
The best applications of Design Thinking are when design and insight professionals collaborate closely.
And next time, in the final article of the series, we’ll explore a case study that did just this: a collaboration between designers and researchers used Design Thinking to create a mobile app that assists and empowers youths to tackle cyberbullying. Stay tuned.
